Like a holiday
24 - 28 June, Ian
The past few days since Zoe and I returned home
from our walk have been more like a normal holiday than any time since we've
been away. I don't know what differentiates a holiday from general travel, if
anything, but one factor is that the longest conversation I've had with any
locals recently has been a discussion with a waiter about which wine to have.
In the mornings we often go down to a beach a couple of minutes from our villa where there are great rock pools. It's usually totally deserted, which is strange considering that it's so close to the centre of Calvi, and at its busiest there are never more than one or two couples there. You could swim and snorkel off the shore there, though we don't, and it's also a nice spot for watching the yachts that race around the bay. There are some attractive looking houses that overlook this beach and we inevitably dream about buying one one day. The girls hop and squat around the pools with their shrimping nets and bucket, and I alternate between helping them and doing The Telegraph crossword.
Sometimes we give this session a miss if we have other things to do but (when we're in town) we always spend a few hours in the afternoon on Calvi's main beach. It's nicely sandy and shelves off very gradually, although you can go out far enough to swim in fairly deep water. I'm pleased that the girls have both become so proficient and confident at this, especially Zoe, who has the extra strength from being two years older. Heidi's front crawl has improved noticeably over the past couple of weeks, no doubt the results of coaching from her Mum and Grandad while Zoe and I were away.
The sea-life is richer than it first appears, with numerous fish and plenty of star fish, jelly fish (though these seem to have gone over the past couple of weeks since it got so much hotter), hermit crabs, urchins and anemones (it's an effort for me not to write this as "anenomes"). Zoe and I were swimming out a couple of days ago and saw the dark outline of quite a large octopus "walking" on the sea bed; you may recall that we spotted one a couple of weeks ago as we looked down into the sea from a groin off the beach - now this is my first live underwater sighting. We also see quite a lot of these:
They each have a little chap inside like a hermit crab (so we can't keep the shells). Any idea what they are? (And I still don't have a translation for sansonnet...)
Yesterday I went for a run in the morning, just after 9:30. I'd forgotten how hard it is to run in this heat with these hills. I've found myself fitting a morning run into my routine the last couple of times I've been in Corsica and my experience is that you just can't start early enough to avoid it being too hot.
Our other little routines include Zoe fetching pastries and baguettes from the boulangerie in the morning (and picking up the papers on the way back) and dinner (with dessert, partly sourced from the patisserie, by Zoe) in the evening. We had a meal out at a harbour-front restaurant the other night - the food was very average but the setting was jolly. Tonight we're trying a little place down the road that looks low key but I have high hopes!
Last night I had my real first dose of TV since we've been away: Paula and I watched Ferderer progress to the Wimbledon quarter-finals. Of course, the tennis was good but I especially enjoyed the commentary. It's pitched at about my language level (limited vocab, predictable topic, plenty of repetition) and the commentators seems very sympathetic; talking about the other matches they seem to have no problem being simultaneously patriotic and fair-minded. Also we do get a kick out of how French their French is: there's no shortage of "Ooh la la"s and "Magnifique!"s. I wonder if our commentators sound as English when they're saying players' names as their French counterparts do when they mention Teem Enmern and Layton Uweet. I guess they must. Does it surprise you as much as it does me that the pronunciation of the top players' names isn't given approximately the same everywhere? I can recall several years ago when it seemed that the BBC rechristened (Seve) Bally-Stair-Os to Buyer-Stay-Ros as an apparent matter of policy. As you probably know, Federer (who alternated between Faydairair and Faydairur throughout the match) won a good match well. We think he looks like Quentin Tarrantino. Shame it wasn't him that made that Wimbledon film, then it might have been a movie you could watch when you weren't on a plane. (I wonder what Tim made of that film?)
I've also been tracking the scary progress of the top chess computer "Hydra" against the top England player Michael Adams. Being the top England player at chess actually means something, as it's one discipline where we punch well beyond our weight. (When I used to play England was the second strongest chess nation after the USSR - now it's probably the 10th strongest after constituent countries of the former USSR, plus whichever other nations have come on in the meantime.) Adams stood to win $25k for every win and $10k for every draw in a best of six match. Well he went down by the crushing margin of 3.5 - 0.5 and I don't know if they're playing out the remaining games. In the last game Hydra found a superb piece sacrifice to win - of course, that's just what you might expect a computer to be good at, but it was impressive nonetheless.
We decided yesterday that we'd take the train to Bastia today, but when we got up this morning we felt too tired and lazy. While reading about it I read the astonishing statistic that last time they checked (1998) Corsica accounted for over half the violent crime in France while having only about 0.5% (or 0.05% as they say in my error-dense guide) of the population. The author of my guide claims that things have calmed down since then as a consequence of the French government funnelling much bigger subsidies into the island. Don't let all of this put you off, you should come here anyway: I promise you that you'd like it!
We leave for the US in a few days and our thoughts are gradually turning towards that. Although I couldn't get a CD by Meridianu (mentioned previously) I have one by a similar (though less bassy) group already loaded on my IPod, which will be a nice option on the plane if I want something restful. I've also been trying to buy a new blank, spiral-bound notebook for the past couple of months and so far have had no luck: is it only in liberal England that people don't want to write on the lines? I'm hopeful I can get one in the US.
En route to the US we overnight in Nice, where we're having dinner with Reynald and Stephanie (see last entry). We're all looking forward to this. I've also discovered that texting may be a good medium for language practice as the prose necessarily comes in bite-size chunks. Shame that switching my Nokia language to French doesn't also flip the predictive text dictionary.
Next time I think I may write some notes about having been away for three months. Ian
In the mornings we often go down to a beach a couple of minutes from our villa where there are great rock pools. It's usually totally deserted, which is strange considering that it's so close to the centre of Calvi, and at its busiest there are never more than one or two couples there. You could swim and snorkel off the shore there, though we don't, and it's also a nice spot for watching the yachts that race around the bay. There are some attractive looking houses that overlook this beach and we inevitably dream about buying one one day. The girls hop and squat around the pools with their shrimping nets and bucket, and I alternate between helping them and doing The Telegraph crossword.
Sometimes we give this session a miss if we have other things to do but (when we're in town) we always spend a few hours in the afternoon on Calvi's main beach. It's nicely sandy and shelves off very gradually, although you can go out far enough to swim in fairly deep water. I'm pleased that the girls have both become so proficient and confident at this, especially Zoe, who has the extra strength from being two years older. Heidi's front crawl has improved noticeably over the past couple of weeks, no doubt the results of coaching from her Mum and Grandad while Zoe and I were away.
The sea-life is richer than it first appears, with numerous fish and plenty of star fish, jelly fish (though these seem to have gone over the past couple of weeks since it got so much hotter), hermit crabs, urchins and anemones (it's an effort for me not to write this as "anenomes"). Zoe and I were swimming out a couple of days ago and saw the dark outline of quite a large octopus "walking" on the sea bed; you may recall that we spotted one a couple of weeks ago as we looked down into the sea from a groin off the beach - now this is my first live underwater sighting. We also see quite a lot of these:
They each have a little chap inside like a hermit crab (so we can't keep the shells). Any idea what they are? (And I still don't have a translation for sansonnet...)
Yesterday I went for a run in the morning, just after 9:30. I'd forgotten how hard it is to run in this heat with these hills. I've found myself fitting a morning run into my routine the last couple of times I've been in Corsica and my experience is that you just can't start early enough to avoid it being too hot.
Our other little routines include Zoe fetching pastries and baguettes from the boulangerie in the morning (and picking up the papers on the way back) and dinner (with dessert, partly sourced from the patisserie, by Zoe) in the evening. We had a meal out at a harbour-front restaurant the other night - the food was very average but the setting was jolly. Tonight we're trying a little place down the road that looks low key but I have high hopes!
Last night I had my real first dose of TV since we've been away: Paula and I watched Ferderer progress to the Wimbledon quarter-finals. Of course, the tennis was good but I especially enjoyed the commentary. It's pitched at about my language level (limited vocab, predictable topic, plenty of repetition) and the commentators seems very sympathetic; talking about the other matches they seem to have no problem being simultaneously patriotic and fair-minded. Also we do get a kick out of how French their French is: there's no shortage of "Ooh la la"s and "Magnifique!"s. I wonder if our commentators sound as English when they're saying players' names as their French counterparts do when they mention Teem Enmern and Layton Uweet. I guess they must. Does it surprise you as much as it does me that the pronunciation of the top players' names isn't given approximately the same everywhere? I can recall several years ago when it seemed that the BBC rechristened (Seve) Bally-Stair-Os to Buyer-Stay-Ros as an apparent matter of policy. As you probably know, Federer (who alternated between Faydairair and Faydairur throughout the match) won a good match well. We think he looks like Quentin Tarrantino. Shame it wasn't him that made that Wimbledon film, then it might have been a movie you could watch when you weren't on a plane. (I wonder what Tim made of that film?)
I've also been tracking the scary progress of the top chess computer "Hydra" against the top England player Michael Adams. Being the top England player at chess actually means something, as it's one discipline where we punch well beyond our weight. (When I used to play England was the second strongest chess nation after the USSR - now it's probably the 10th strongest after constituent countries of the former USSR, plus whichever other nations have come on in the meantime.) Adams stood to win $25k for every win and $10k for every draw in a best of six match. Well he went down by the crushing margin of 3.5 - 0.5 and I don't know if they're playing out the remaining games. In the last game Hydra found a superb piece sacrifice to win - of course, that's just what you might expect a computer to be good at, but it was impressive nonetheless.
We decided yesterday that we'd take the train to Bastia today, but when we got up this morning we felt too tired and lazy. While reading about it I read the astonishing statistic that last time they checked (1998) Corsica accounted for over half the violent crime in France while having only about 0.5% (or 0.05% as they say in my error-dense guide) of the population. The author of my guide claims that things have calmed down since then as a consequence of the French government funnelling much bigger subsidies into the island. Don't let all of this put you off, you should come here anyway: I promise you that you'd like it!
We leave for the US in a few days and our thoughts are gradually turning towards that. Although I couldn't get a CD by Meridianu (mentioned previously) I have one by a similar (though less bassy) group already loaded on my IPod, which will be a nice option on the plane if I want something restful. I've also been trying to buy a new blank, spiral-bound notebook for the past couple of months and so far have had no luck: is it only in liberal England that people don't want to write on the lines? I'm hopeful I can get one in the US.
En route to the US we overnight in Nice, where we're having dinner with Reynald and Stephanie (see last entry). We're all looking forward to this. I've also discovered that texting may be a good medium for language practice as the prose necessarily comes in bite-size chunks. Shame that switching my Nokia language to French doesn't also flip the predictive text dictionary.
Next time I think I may write some notes about having been away for three months. Ian
Posted: Tue - June 28, 2005 at 06:38 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM
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Published On: Feb 08, 2006 06:20 PM